Link Dumpage for 2009-05-29

"The Story Behind The Looking Glass Laboratories' Alternate Reality Game. The official reasons as to why this ARG was created are: There are several friends and business associates that didn't understand the concept of an "alternate reality game." Some of these friends are prospective writers who did not understand the concept and how it can be used to portray a storyline. We hope we have expressed some of those possibilities. To see what it really is like on the other side of the curtain. You can never understand the amount of work and dedication a "puppetmaster" has to put in to a project until you become one; now having been one, we have more respect for PMs than you can possibly imagine."

"This is when I decided to make my own list of horror movies that A) people don’t know about, B) should be talked about more often, C) are as good as the known classics, and D) need to be seen, for Heaven’s sake!" Includes: And Soon the Darkness..., The Exorcist III, Bunny Lake is Missing, Hour of the Wolf, Long Weekend, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Who Can Kill A Child?, Just Before Dawn, Magic, and The Innocents.

Operation: Sleeper Cell postmortem broken up into preparation and design, fundraising, project management, marketing, mission design, game design, live events and website, tech, and then a recap with player comments and statistics.

I love reading postmortems and summaries of ARG-y things (even for ones I was a judge/consultant on, like this one:) "Operation: Sleeper Cell was made by Law 37 to raise money and awareness for Cancer Research UK as a result of the Let's Change The Game competition. The game ran for ten weeks in late 2008 and we raised £3668 in total. Everybody who worked on the game did so in their spare time as volunteers."

"We'll just fix that in post!" has always been the rallying cry for filmmakers in the middle of a troubled production. Unfortunately, sometimes things have a nasty habit of actually getting broken in post-production, usually thanks to studio interference. Victims include: I Am Legend, Superman II, Dawn of the Dead, Live Free or Die Hard, and Blade Runner."

"Dark Room Sex Game is a Wiimote enabled game in which players try to climax with their partners - with no on-screen visuals whatsoever ... Dark Room Sex Game is an erotic multi-player rhythm game without any graphics, played only by audio and haptic cues. The game can be played with Nintendo Wiimote controllers or a keyboard. In Dark Room Sex Game, the player works with his or her partner to find a mutual rhythm, then speeds up gradually until climax. In four-player "orgy" mode, players swap partners randomly and compete to reach orgasm the fastest."

"Operation Snow White was the Church of Scientology's name for a project during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members, in more than 30 countries;[1] the single largest infiltration of the United States government in history[2] with up to 5,000 covert agents."

"After last year's column I got a flood of new suggestions from frustrated players and developers, so here are nine new Twinkie Denial Conditions for the ninth installment of Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!: Failure to Explain Victory and Loss Conditions; Time-Constrained Demos; Obvious and Cheap Reskins (also known as Cookie-Cutter Games); Computer Crashed While Saving? Game Over!; Friendly AI Characters That Do More Harm Than Good; Fake Interactivity; Bad Gamepad-to-Mouse/Keyboard Conversions (and vice versa); Setting the Player Up to Fail; Your Only Save is Immediately Before Your Death."

"The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building ... The clock has been designed by the inventor and horologist Dr John Taylor and makes ingenious use of the grasshopper escapement, moving it from the inside of the clock to the outside and refashioning it as a Chronophage, or time-eater, which literally devours time."

"What in-game objectives ought to merit achievements? How can games best be designed with achievements (and achievers) in mind? What further rewards can be tied to achievements to enhance their effective use in games? How much worth do game achievements truly have? In order to better approach these and other questions, GameCyte consulted Rene Weber, a professor of psychology and telecommunications, and Patrick Shaw, a game designer/developer, who recently collaborated to research and define player types and motivations in modern gaming. Weber and Shaw offered us their considerable expertise in order to examine why game achievements have become such a vital part of our gaming experience."